Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Meg Rosenthal is driving toward the next chapter in her life. Winding along a wooded roadway, her car moves through a dense forest setting not unlike one in the bedtime stories Meg used to read to her daughter, Sally. But the girl riding beside Meg is a teenager now, and has exchanged the land of make-believe for an iPod and some personal space. Too much space, it seems, as the chasm between them has grown since the sudden, unexpected death of Meg’s husband.

Dire financial straits and a desire for a fresh start take Meg and Sally from a comfortable life on Long Island to a tucked-away hamlet in upstate New York: Arcadia Falls, where Meg has accepted a teaching position at a boarding school. The creaky, neglected cottage Meg and Sally are to call home feels like an ill portent of things to come, but Meg is determined to make the best of it—and to make a good impression on the school’s dean, the diminutive, elegant Ivy St. Clare.

St. Claire, however, is distracted by a shocking crisis: During Arcadia’s First Night bonfire, one of Meg’s folklore students, Isabel Cheney, plunges to her death in a campus gorge. Sheriff Callum Reade finds Isabel’s death suspicious, but then, he is a man with secrets and a dark past himself.

Meg is unnerved by Reade’s interest in the girl’s death, and as long-buried secrets emerge, she must face down her own demons and the danger threatening to envelop Sally. As the past clings tight to the present, the shadows, as if in a terrifying fairy tale, grow longer and deadlier.

In Arcadia Falls, award-winning author Carol Goodman deftly weaves a mesmerizing narrative of passion: for revenge, for art, for love.

"The Other Woman" by Sandie Jones
“The Other Woman is an absorbing thriller with a great twist. A perfect beach read.” ― Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author of "The Great Alone" Pre-order today

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Carol Goodman on Arcadia Falls: The Red Rose Girls and the Three A.M. Demons

There were two threads that went into the origin of Arcadia Falls. One rather academic and intellectual, one deeply personal.

The first came from an exhibit I saw at the Norman Rockwell Museum in the fall of 2003. The exhibit featured three women artists: Jessie Wilcox Smith, Violet Oakley, and Elizabeth Shippen Green. The women had met at the turn of the 19th century in a class at Drexel University taught by Howard Pyle. Pyle encouraged the three women to throw in their lot together because, he said, "Once a woman marries, that's the end of her." When they moved into an old inn called The Red Rose, Pyle began to call them the Red Rose Girls.

The exhibit was inspiring for its luminous illustrations and paintings--many of which I recognized from the pictures I'd hung on my daughter's nursery walls--but also for its story. These three women had found a way to be artists in an era that prohibited women from taking life drawing classes because it was considered to make them unfit for their true vocations as wives. Although the partnership eventually broke up when Eilizabeth Shippen Green married, Violet Oakley and Jessie Wilcox Smith went on to work as artists for the rest of their lives.

Implanted in my mind was the germ of an idea for a novel about a group of women artists who band together to pursue their art outside of the confines of marriage, which would have to be a historical piece because, after all, women could have families and pursue artistic careers in the present. Right?

At some point in the story's development, while I wrote other novels and my daughter grew up, I realized that I wanted to juxtapose a modern story against the historical one. The character of Meg Rosenthal, traveling upstate with her teenaged daughter Sally, emerged, according to my notebooks, in 2007, and it came out of a very visceral fear. Specifically that kind of fear that wakes you up at three in the morning and then keeps you awake, alone in the dark, spinning out worst-case scenarios until dawn. My yoga teacher told me once that there's a tradition in Vedic mythology that 3 a.m. is when you're most vulnerable to demons. When my daughter was little those demons gave me nightmares about losing her in crowded department stores. When she grew into a teenager I’d wake in the middle of the night with images of car wrecks and drug addiction, unplanned pregnancies and depression. There are ways you can lose a child who's sitting right in front of you. In fact, you are losing them, little by little, to adulthood. The child you knew is slowly vanishing, hopefully to become an adult you recognize.

I suppose it was these fears that made me think about the changeling story. Of all fairy tales it's perhaps the most horrifying to a parent--the idea that your child could be snatched away from you and replaced by a wooden (in some of the stories the replacement is actually made of wood), unfeeling creature that looks like your child but isn't.

The changeling story is about infants, but it occurred to me during one of my 3 a.m. bouts that it could describe the experience of raising a teenager. What parent of a teenager hasn't felt at some moment that the sweet child who doted on your every word has been replaced by a touchy, moody, eye-rolling teenager?

And so, I started Arcadia Falls with a mother and a daughter in a car. The mother, Meg, is trying to cajole and humor her daughter Sally, who's furious at her mother for moving her before her junior year of high school. Sally, plugged into her iPod, grows more distant the more her mother tries to connect. Because that to me is the hardest thing about raising a teenager. When they're little you know how to comfort them, but when they're older and in pain sometimes it seems like you only make it worse trying to comfort them. Sometimes you have to step back and let them find their own way out of their pain. It's like standing on the edge of a dark forest and watching your child enter the woods armed only with a covered basket and a handful of bread crumbs and hoping they'll find their way to the other side. All you can do is hope they remember the lessons you've taught them--be kind to helpless creatures, don't trust wolves dressed up as men, but do trust in your own strength and bravery.

Meg Rosenthal is afraid that she's failed to teach Sally that last lesson, precisely because she herself has sacrificed a piece of herself to be a good mother. She abandoned her own dreams of being an artist in order to be a mother.

So, I suppose the central question in Arcadia Falls is whether it's possible to be a good parent and an artist. Art--at least the kind I know first hand, writing--requires a tremendous investment of time and attention. When I'm absorbed in writing a book the world I'm creating sometimes seems more real than the world around me.

Over the last 15 years I think I've balanced being a writer and a mother pretty well. I've written nine books and never once forgot to pick my daughter up from school. (I did forget to pick up the dog from the groomers once, but that's another story.) I may have been distracted now and then, but I've also spent hours talking to my daughter about writing and storytelling, learning as much from her as she's learned from me. I think that being a parent has enriched my ability to write--and I hope that being a writer has made me at least a more interesting parent to her--but it's always been a balancing act. One I consider myself lucky to have been able to even attempt.

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Even though Carol Goodman has been over this ground before in previous books, this is worth the read. Visiting a small private school in upstate NY, near a rushing river (here, not the Hudson, but it might as well be), in Goodman's company is like having a sleep over with your best friend, telling ghost stories. You know it will work out OK for the lead characters, but there will be some scary stuff on the way. Goodman's leads often have a lost love (widowed, as here, or divorced or split from long-time loves.) They are also always placed in a new setting, strangers in very strange lands. They are well-read, being academics, and they have a cast of young student characters around them, along with mysterious adult colleagues and various hangers-on.

In some ways I wonder if Goodman wouldn't have been even more successful if she had created a series character who could have experienced all of her books: her main characters are all quite similar. I don't mean that as a criticism. Her books' common themes and characters make them feel like a series, and that can be very comforting -- after all we all like Poirot, Holmes, Miss Marple, etc. I gave this one a 4 rather than a 5 only because the tumultuous finale is a bit over-the-top with its mixed up birth records and coincidences.

I am a fan Of Ms. Goodman's but I have to say this latest book falls very short of her previous works. I am a huge gothic, romance, mystery reader from way back, starting with the great writers Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney, Barbara Michaels. So I have been reading gothic for years, and I have to admit, there are not too many authors in this genre who live up to my expectations. I thought Ms. Goodman would. She wrote the mood well, really well, but that is really all the book was. The mood. I loved the descriptions of the scenery, it set the "mood" great. But the rest? I started it and kept thinking did she really write this? The characters were cardboard, the story done before. I don't know, it just was not up to par. I kept reading it thinking it would get better, I would start caring, I would get scared, (I know, as I got older I moved on to books that can really frighten, but I never lost my love of gothic romance), but none of those things ever happened. It was written well, but scenery and mood do not make a book.Sorry Ms. Goodman, I will read your next one I am sure, I will not give up on you, but for all those people looking for a book in this genre, wait for the paperback.

Goodman writes in metaphors. I love the way she puts words together. I love her way of tying a mythical story with the main c characters. Her writing style is very similar to the way to the way my mother talked (she is no longer living). So, generally, I will seek out and read a Goodman novel, because on some level it feels like being able to go back and have a conversation with my mother. That said, this is not one of Goodman's best efforts. It feels like recycled bits cobbled from other books. I would highly recommend reading "The Seduction of Water" and skipping this one. But if this is your first Goodman novel, you will enjoy it.

I love this author's early work, and this tale of a mother and daughter caught up in a murder from the past (and one in the present) is a joy to read. As always, this author relies too much on coincidence, but I can overlook that when she delivers such rich descriptions and suspense.

Carol Goodman is the type of writer that is so engaging but this novel was not up to her usual par. It began with an engaging premise where the main character has to deal with grief, a drastic change of life circumstances, and a traumatized teen daughter. The lead is a teacher at an arts boarding school in upstate NY. She uses fairy tales to entice her students to consider their own lives and history. Interwoven were fairy tales and art, as well as the history of the boarding school and the arts colony from which it grew. However, there were elements that became so overblown and unrealistic, it turned into a melodrama. Disappointing towards the end.

I have thoroughly enjoyed all of Carol Goodman's novels, including her two trilogies. I had saved this novel because I couldn't bare not having a new one to read. Finally I read it, and loved it. It is a very powerful tale of women and their responsibility to their vocations and their children....with some wonderful fairy tales thrown it. I will try to be patient until her next novel appears. In the meantime, I am enjoying the Blythewood saga.

Meg has been recently and unexpectedly widowed, leaving her and her daughter, Sally, in financial straits. Rather than ask for help from her in-laws, she takes a position at a private boarding school for the arts teaching folklore. She has a deep interest in the two women founders of the school, Lily and Vera, the subjects of her unfinished dissertation, and has a cherished copy from her grandmother of their book of illustrated fairy tales. She is struggling with her teenage daughter, but has a glimpse of the girl she used to know as she tells her one of the tales, inspired by the surroundings of the school entitled "The Changeling" as they arrive at the school. The tale and its imagery are amazing, although we don't hear the rest of the story until later in the book. Changelings play a a key role in the story, both current and the story of Lily and Vera. After an unexpected death at the school, Meg digs deeper into the history of Lily and Vera. While I enjoyed the book overall, I found a few plot elements to be a little clunky. I did figure out some of the plot twists in advance, but some were a little unexpected. I did find the fairy tale to be magical and it was one of my favorite parts.

This is a great story that holds onto you long after you put the book down. I did not give it 5 stars because I thought the plot was not very well developed. The ending was surprising to me and seemed kind of just thrown in there. That said, I did enjoy the book very much.